Overwhelming majority of all customer communications occur over the phone. Despite the increasing presence of social media and online customer service tools, the nature of this paradigm is that voice communications are the most direct interactive communications that exist. While it is convenient to use the phone, verbal communications over the phone often fall short of enabling the listener to adequately understand, diagnose, triage, and resolve the issues. In this regard, verbal communications have the apparent lack of clarity, which makes customer service support extremely expensive while frustrating to many.
Over the past few years, there has been an increase in a number of video conferencing and video chat solutions on the market. Modern real-time video communications systems fuse audio and video data into a uniform medium that combines the voice and the video channels together. In web conferencing, the video and the audio travel together and the video frames are synchronized for optimal quality teleconferencing interaction, creating a uniform transmission of communication.
Combining voice communication with visual communication, and in particular, real-time video, makes the communication simpler, easy, and productive while increasing the quality of a customer service experience. Phone conversations, whether coming from a mobile device or a landline do not have a way to deliver a visual stream to the conversation. Generally, existing video conferencing systems, e.g., Skype, require participants to be connected to each other prior to commencing a conversation. Another video conferencing system, FaceTime, is limited for use on certain devices, namely, Apple devices. Furthermore, existing systems and methods for conducting real-time video transfer or live streaming rely heavily on network connectivity. In this regard, live video streaming is very sensitive to the network bandwidth capacity, and quality of the video can suffer depending on the bandwidth and the size of the video resolution. Thus, videos must be recorded and then uploaded at a later time if network connectivity is not available or unreliable.
In addition, all of the existing systems require the participants to install software on their electronic devices in order to start communicating. For example, to communicate over Skype, all parties in communication must first install the Skype application before calling. Similarly, to communicate over FaceTime, both parties must have an Apple device with the FaceTime application pre-installed. In this regard, existing systems require an initial set up process to configure an end user to become a conversation participant and acquire a visual communication. More specifically, the end user, i.e., a customer, would have to call a customer support hotline, connect to a customer service support agent, hang up the phone, install appropriate software, and then re-connect with another customer service support agent through a separate system, e.g., via the installed software. Alternatively, the end user must have a pre-recorded video and transmit it to the customer service support agent via a secondary platform such as a website for sharing videos.
The examples above illustrate that there have been limited means to enhance a phone conversation with a real-time visual channel. Applying these concepts to help desk support and/or customer service environments, field operations, etc. and then fitting them within a business workflow, creates a need for a real-time video centric customer service support help system that allows customer service support agents, or business employees, to connect to real-time visual streams coming from the mobile devices of their customers and other employees.
The present invention provides a system that combines ad-hoc real-time visual streaming functionality into a centralized hub of customer service interaction or a field operation management enterprise platform. The system includes unique algorithms for identifying participants of the communication channels using mobile device metadata and the way they connect to the other parties, and re-routing of the audio channel for uniform processing. This innovative invention not only addresses the dynamic ability to provide the visual without disconnecting from the phone, but also provides solutions to tackle on-demand distribution of the application, while the end user or the customer is connected over the phone.